Michael Larabel

While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.

While we are all waiting for the NVIDIA R555 series Linux driver beta that is expected to debut as soon as next week based on prior information with Wayland improvements (explicit sync) and more, with the NVIDIA R560 series Linux driver successor is a very interesting change: NVIDIA is planning on defaulting to using their open-source GPU kernel driver by default for GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" GPUs and newer.

Overnight systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering wrote on Mastodon around systemd's newest effort: run0 as a sudo-like command.

For those interested in some insightful Linux kernel mailing list reading this weekend, there's been a vibrant discussion on the ability for the Linux kernel to mitigate unexpected arithmetic overflows/underflows/wraparounds.

Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government.

Linux kernel and Git creator Linus Torvalds is known for his current use of an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation as his main system after years of using Intel hardware. The past few years he's also been doing more ARM64 testing now that he has an Apple MacBook using Apple Silicon that serves as a nice travel device and for routinely compiling new ARM64 Linux kernel builds. More recently, his ARM64 Linux testing has increased now that he has a more powerful AArch64 system to complement his collection of routine gear.

As a small information heads up, the Linux 6.10 kernel will print the number of populated memory slots at boot time to the kernel log as a little helper.

Linux Mint published their monthly status update for April 2024 where they talk about ongoing testing for faster and more reliable repository access via the Fastly CDN to other more interesting software happenings like the likelihood that they will fork more GNOME applications as well as looking to make their XApp applications more distribution agnostic.

Back in 2019 Microsoft open-sourced Cascadia Code as a font designed for terminals and code editors. The goals are similar to that of Intel's more recent One Mono as another open-source font for developers. It's been three years since the last update to the Cascadia Code open-source font while today rolled out version 2404.23.

Besides Linus Torvalds examining various elements of code he's merging and build testing it on his AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation and now also testing more on ARM64 with Ampere Altra, he does these days still believe in "dogfooding" and is in fact running the leading-edge Linux kernel code even during the merge window.

In addition to all of the contributions Valve graphics engineers have been making to the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, they have also begun investing in improvements to the open-source Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver too. With pending patches there is now explicit GPU synchronization support working for the NVK driver in conjunction with their Gamescope compositor.

While on Linux the desktop environments, graphics stack, and other application software is steadily adopting Wayland support and focusing less on X11/X.Org support, the state of Wayland support and the open-source graphics driver stack in general is less robust among the BSDs. The NetBSD project published a status report around their ongoing dependence and modifications to their X.Org stack.

The modular/upgradeable Framework Laptops employ an open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware derived from Google's Chrome OS EC project. This is great for open-source fans and allows re-using much of the same Chrome OS EC software support that already exists. But there is also vendor-specific commands supported by the Framework Laptop EC and thus a dedicated Linux kernel driver is now being worked on for handling those vendor/device-specific features.

Redox OS as the from-scratch, Rust-written open-source operating system had a successful April with now having USB keyboards and mice now working with their USB HID driver.

Red Hat Summit 2024 is underway in Denver, Colorado... Given the times, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking a heavy presence at the event with Red Hat announcing today RHEL AI.

GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu's GNOME MicroReleaseException "MRE" policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel's back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a "significant new feature" into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception.

Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing.

The uutils' Rust-based Coreutils implementation is out with another update that further increases the drop-in replacement compatibility with GNU Coreutils.

Wine 9.8 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games/applications on Linux / Chrome OS, macOS, and other platforms.

The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair.

Released back in March of 2018 was the Amarok 2.9 music player for this KDE project. Shipping today is finally Amarok 3.0 as the first major release in six years and now ported to Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

There's been a lot of improvements coming about in the GNOME desktop space thanks to the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund and other initiatives toward GNOME 47.

Back in January the Zed editor was open-sourced for this new code editor from the creators of the Atom editor and Tree-sitter syntax parsing framework. This high performance code editor has been initially focused on macOS support while the Linux support has begun coming together.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE's KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve's Gamescope compositor.

Back in late 2023 were Rust abstractions for the Linux kernel's Virtual File-System (VFS) code. Those patches by Microsoft engineer Wedson Almeida Filho have now seen a second iteration posted... In addition to various improvements to the Rust VFS bindings, the new patches bring a work-in-progress EXT2 Rust file-system driver.